As the conflict in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region enters its sixth month, the U.N. Security Council broke its silence Thursday to call for scaled-up humanitarian access and “a restoration of normalcy.
The Tigray interim administration estimates that at least 4.5 million of Tigray’s nearly 6 million people need humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has appealed for $1.5 billion to assist 16 million people in Tigray and across Ethiopia this year.
“More than one million people have been displaced, and fighting continues. Access and security remain serious issues.
Met a 16-year-old girl who fled fighting in the western part of Tigray, and walked – with her baby brother on her back – for 300 kilometers (186 miles).
“This is also an education and nutrition emergency, and I saw extensive destruction to the systems and essential services on which children rely.
The bodies are buried on a small ravine just where they were killed. And in between the bushes, there’s dozens of bullets. What the family members are saying is that after they were killed, the bodies were left here for 20 days, and they had to beg the soldiers to come and let them bury their loved ones.
Twenty injured people treated at hospitals supported by MSF
“The indiscriminate shooting of people far from a front line is shocking—in a public place, in a big town, in a busy moment of the day,” said Maricarmen Viñoles, the head of MSF’s emergency unit. “We urge all armed parties to this conflict to protect and respect people’s lives.”
“More than one million people have been displaced, and fighting continues. Access and security remain serious issues.
“This is a protection crisis. What is emerging is a disturbing picture of severe and ongoing child rights violations.
“This is also an education and nutrition emergency, and I saw extensive destruction to the systems and essential services on which children rely.
“Humanitarians absolutely need unhindered access to populations in need, and we are concerned about the fact that there are populations that we haven’t yet been able to reach,” said Emily Dakin, the senior U.S. Agency for International Development official leading the U.S. response in Tigray.
More 500 rape cases have been reported, the United Nations said in late March, although the number is likely higher. The top health official in Tigray’s interim government told Reuters last week, “Women are being kept in sexual slavery.”
Th”Only in one health post, I have seen 53 people who were injured, and 18 people killed. All of them are from Oromo ethnic groups.”
“The Amhara regional state government is seeking justification to commit another act of ethnic cleansing by claiming they are fighting OLA in Wollo.”
Over the past three decades, the Horn of Africa has acquired a bad reputation as a notoriously unstable subregion with a highly volatile socio-political framework.
This region can only be described as one at war with itself, owing to a number of issues from tribal and clan dynamics to historical injustices. Therefore, the solution for instability should be sourced from within – as only the insiders can truly understand and contextualise the full extent of their problems.
A wave of genocidal massacres has swept Metekel in the Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that has left hundreds of thousands displaced, thousands killed and injured and many more left destitute with their homes and livelihoods burned to ashes.
The defence ministry says deadly armed violence witnessed in parts of the Oromia special zones.
Ethiopia’s chief ombudsman, Endale Haile, told AFP news agency earlier this month that the violence in Amhara had killed more than 300 people over several days in March.
